Xbox One pulls power from the cloud

Microsoft is telling the world+dog that if you buy a new Xbox, you will also be getting the power of three more reside in the cloud. Group program manager of Xbox Incubation & Prototyping Jeff Henshaw told OXM that for every console Microsoft builds, it will provision the CPU and storage equivalent of three Xbox One consoles in the cloud.

This allows developers to assume that there's roughly three times the resources immediately available to their game. This means that developers can build bigger, persistent levels that are more inclusive for players. Already the Xbox One is ten times more powerful than the Xbox 360, so we're effectively 40 times greater than the Xbox 360 in terms of processing capabilities, a spokesMicrosoft said.

He said that if a user is looking at a forest scene and needs to calculate the light coming through the trees, or you’re going through a battlefield and have very dense volumetric fog that’s hugging the terrain the complicated up-front calculations are perfect candidates for the console to offload that to the cloud—the cloud can do the heavy lifting.

Cloud computation could even handle physics modelling, fluid dynamics, and cloth motion which require a lot of up-front computation, without adding lag to the actual gameplay.